Transcript

Antony Funnell: It's not apparent from photographs that Dmitri Shostakovich smiled much. The great Russian composer suffered for his art. He was at first feted, then cajoled, criticised, condemned and many believe compromised by the wicked political construct that was the Soviet Union. But despite that, he still managed to produce music like this, with a sense of playfulness.

[Music]

Perhaps it was that playfulness that kept him going. Perhaps.

Carl Jung, another 20th century icon not exactly associated with a good laugh, once said of play, 'The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct.'

For a very long time it was customary to think of play as an activity of secondary importance, as a side issue to daily life, the thing you did when you got all your real jobs out of the way. But it occurs to us here at Future Tense that in the digital world, play is an important driver and motivator of activity. In other words, the dynamics of play are at play in much of what we do online.

So, what does that mean for individuals and society? That's the question we're examining today. Hello, Antony Funnell here, and welcome to Future Tense.

Tom Chatfield: My name is Tom Chatfield, and I'm a British author and commentator on digital culture.

Antony Funnell: And Tom Chatfield is the first of several guests we'll hear from in this program, people who are being playful with the idea of play and pushing its boundaries as a force for innovation and future living.

Tom Chatfield: I think play is a really brilliant emblem of a lot of what is going on online a lot of the time. It's kind of crossing over from being something for fun that people did in their leisure time to being a way of thinking about technology. Because we talk about user experience, there's this intense Darwinian competition for people's very limited time and attention, and more and more the idea of pleasurable user experience is becoming one of the defining features of apps and programs and services. And they are very busily learning lessons from games because the art and the science of making something fun and engaging has reached really quite a sophisticated pitch in games in terms of interfaces, in terms of feedback, in terms of knowing the sweet spot between challenge and reward where you are taking someone by the hand and guiding them through a process but you are reinforcing…you're asking them to do stuff but too much.

So play for me is quite an important modern emblem of the way in which we are almost reverse engineering from the human brain online and building services that are expressly designed to tick our evolutionary boxes, to reward, to entice, and to give people social incentives above all. We love comparing ourselves to other people. So in the broad sense you could almost go as far as saying things like Twitter or Facebook are a kind of very clever game because people have a profile which they care about, and they are constantly in the business of trying to make numbers go up, trying to get more followers, trying to get more likes, trying to get more tweets or re-tweets. They are comparing themselves to other people. Again, in Twitter there's a sort of global scoring system where you can see where you are ranked. And there are these very playful dynamics as well whereby you are free to do anything you like within the rules of the game, within the magic circle there on screen. You can switch on, you can switch off, you can like, you can unlike, you can really indulge whimsy. So that's one thing.

But on the other hand I would say that this is one way of talking about play but there is the rather more profound creative playfulness that can go on. Often the locked-down systems you find online that are targeted at good user experience can close that down, can stop people from playing in the more creative sense. And I think there's a real tension there between giving people easy low-level constant rewarding play and building environments which are rewardingly and constructively and excitingly playful. The game Minecraft is one of the great modern examples I think of a rather brilliant sandbox, like a sandpit that you can get into and build castles and build anything you can imagine and really let your creativity run riot.

And we don't see that much of that online actually, that doesn't tend to make as much money, it tends to be harder and more serendipitous to do. So there's a little bit of a battle going on perhaps even over the meaning of play and playfulness and this kind of pleasure-led interaction.

Antony Funnell: If that's the case then, should we see the hacker culture, the DIY culture as an attempt to fight against that locking-down, to actually embrace play?

Tom Chatfield: The word 'hacker' is so fraught as well. You know, talking about the histories of words, back in MIT hacks were originally pranks, and to be a hacker in the very early days of computing was to be someone creative who thought outside the box, who could put together a solution but who also had a sense of mischief but a very creative mischief. And now a lot of people like to refer to themselves as makers, you know, they have maker spaces and things like that, to differentiate themselves from black hat hackers or those who just want to perhaps make a political protest or just cause grief for the sake of it or even make money or be involved in the criminal aspect of things.

But the culture of making things, of taking things apart, understanding how they go together, and putting them together again in a way so that you understand, that is absolutely a response and a way of pushing back against this sort of locking-down of possibilities. And it is playful I think in the most creative and straightforward sense, and it's highly collaborative of course, it's about people coming together literally in physical spaces and sharing each other's recipes and ideas.

And the great thing is there has always been this strand in geek or computing culture, and it is encouraged by some people. In Britain the Raspberry Pi computer has been a huge success, a tiny little cheap computer that is designed for you physically to be able to see how it works, combine it with all kinds of different outputs, code for it, do your own thing. And people who are hacking in the creative sense have done amazing things with things like Microsoft Connect, for example, the culture of connect hacks, this incredibly powerful box that can watch you through stereoscopic cameras and has a microphone and stuff. So people are very much pushing against these constraints, and very often that means crossing over from just the on screen to the physical as well.

Eric Zimmerman: My name is Eric Zimmerman, I am a game designer and a professor at the Game Centre at New York University in New York City. Playing games is part of being human, the way that making and listening to music is, the way that telling stories helps us be better human beings.

Antony Funnell: Now, something you need to know about Eric Zimmerman; Professor Zimmerman is an expert on game dynamics, as you've heard, and he has this theory that we've now entered what he calls the 'Ludic' Century, Ludic being an adjective meaning 'of or relating to play or playfulness'.

Eric Zimmerman: What I mean by the Ludic Century is the idea that one way of looking at the times in which we live is that games and play are central to this time in a way that, for example, information and the moving image were central to the 20th century. That film and video were the main ways that people express themselves in the sense of personal narratives, news and journalism, epic narratives were spun out in filmmaking and on television. And while of course there were other forms of important culture that happened in the 20th century, like radio, for example, in literature and in music and other cultural forms, the moving image, in a sense, is kind of paradigmatic of information in that it is information that is passably accessed by an audience or a viewer when it's broadcast or projected.

In contrast, games are doing something else with information. They not storing information which is later accessed, games really let you play with information, and this is true whether you're moving the pieces on a chessboard and exploring strategies and the psychology of your opponent, whether you are playing tennis and exerting yourself as you try and follow the rules of the game to overcome your partner, or whether you're playing a computer game, maybe you're playing Minecraft in which you are really in a sea of information and you are overcoming obstacles and hazards but also you're building things and creating a world as much as you're exploring it.

So games are a cultural form in which systems are central. And systems are really the paradigmatic concept of our time. I feel that we are living in a world of systems; the way that we communicate to each other, the way that we work and learn, the way that we socialise and flirt and romance, the way that we engage with our governments and conduct our finances, all are mediated by digital networks of information. And that means that what it means to be literate today is something which has to engage with this idea of systems.

Antony Funnell: So there's a mind shift required here, in a sense, because many of us are used to be 20th century idea of play as recreation. I mean, we box it in that way. It's not what we do for work, it's not part of our working day as such. But if we're talking about the sort of century that you're talking about, a Ludic Century, play is very much there, it's not just recreation, it is that, but it's also there at the heart of everything we do, isn't it, or will be.

Eric Zimmerman: Yes, and I think that's a good way of putting it. I think that our concepts of what constitutes play and the boundaries between work and play are shifting. Whether this means that we all have to make a conscious shift in our attitudes and approaches to the way we live our lives or not I think is an unanswered question. There's a sense in which the importance of games in our culture is both cause and effect of the Ludic Century, so that in a sense it's happening now, whether we want it to or not, this idea that more and more of our lives are engaged with complex systems of information.

And I do think that this is not just happening in industrialised democracies, to a certain extent it's happening all over the world. And one often sees now in the developing world that there is a leapfrog over traditional forms of infrastructure such as landline telephones to cell phones, for example. And a cell phone network is something which is already kind of systemic and modular and open to more forms of playful improvisation than a traditional telephone network; for example, micro-loan systems for people to rent time for international calls on cell phones. So I think that this idea that we are living in a time in which play and games are central permeates many aspects of our lives.

I also should say, however, that it's possible that all of this is just my myopic bias as a game designer. I myself make games for a living, I play games, I have a passion for understanding how games work and for inventing new forms of play. So I don't think that the ideas of the Ludic Century necessarily have to be thought of in terms of games and play, but I do think that games and play provides some of the best examples of the systemic forms of culture which are emerging now.

Antony Funnell: With the idea of play, traditionally we associate it with a certain amount of freedom and also enjoyment. In a world that is a world of systems, as you describe, is that play that we are going to be doing or that we are doing in different forms, is that always going to be freedom and enjoyment? It seems to me that that won't necessarily be the case.

Eric Zimmerman: That's an excellent question. I think that games paradoxically embody both harsh, fixed, rigid system of rules, and also the playful, creative improvisation that is play. They are both of those things. And the fascinating paradox for me is that in a game the wild, free-form, creative innovation that is play emerges because of the constraints of the rules. So that if you and I were playing chess and kind of pushing the figurines across the grid without really paying attention to what they are and what they did and how we might play the game, we could have fun and maybe we would have a bit of narrative play, but we wouldn't invent something that people dedicate their lives to, that people write books about, that there are centuries of history around the way that people engage with this system, the system of chess. So I think that in games we see that play and rules or systems, are inexorably entwined, and perhaps that's one of the defining features of games and play. And for me it's one of their great enigmatic mysteries.

Tom Chatfield: I think play is a very important creative force, because ultimately…you know, what do we mean by 'progress'? If we mean by 'progress' doing the same thing again but very slightly better in sort of incremental iterative processes, that's something that perhaps always will be accomplished by a team of smart people working according to a known plan. But the moment you want to be disruptive, to be (to use the cliché) outside of the box, the moment you want to challenge the assumptions that perhaps other people don't even realise are holding a field back, you do need to get serendipitous and playful in some sense. You need to be able to do perhaps a practical kind of play, but you do need to take things apart, see how they work, put them back together in different combinations, and also you need to understand people, this is not something that people who work with computers are famous for doing, having vast reserves of empathy. But again and again in the history of technology we see an underestimation of the importance of appealing to people's sense of fun and delight and possibility.

The earliest home computers were expected when they went on the market to sell a few hundred copies to enthusiasts. They sold thousands and thousands, and then tens of thousands. And again, with the social media services, in many ways a lot of the progress that has been made within a service like Twitter, for example, is because people have played around with its possibilities. Really the people who made it just created a microblogging service with no bells and whistles at all and said, right, here you are world, let's see what you make of this.

And people used it and began to play in that space and came up really with everything from re-tweets to hashtags to trends to 'follow Fridays', to this kind of architecture that has made it…well, we don't quite know what, but made it something new, something unprecedented. If they'd come up with a locked-down system that they had thought in advance they knew exactly how it was going to work, we probably wouldn't have had any of these things that have had an enormous impact on the way a lot of people exchange information online.

Antony Funnell: Tom Chatfield again., and before him Eric Zimmerman.

And this is Future Tense, I'm Antony Funnell and today we're playing with the idea of play and its role as an innovator and forward mover.

Time for another quote, and this time I'll dispense with the need for a dubious accent. It's a quote from the legendary American film director Frank Capra who once said, 'Play has been man's most useful preoccupation.' And that brings us nicely to our next guest.

Alex McDowell: My name is Alex McDowell, I'm a production designer for the past 30 years in film and I'm just recently now a professor at USC School of Cinematic Arts teaching world building.

Antony Funnell: And Alex McDowell's production design credits include the films Minority Report, Corpse Bride and Fight Club. Now, aside from his extra-curricular work at the University of Southern California, he also runs his own creative think tank. It's called the 5D Institute.

Alex McDowell: 5D started really as a forum, as an excuse for me to call up anybody and say, hey, would you like to have a conversation about the future of play, or how do we start creating a methodology that transcends the silos that we are working in. So I started talking a lot with people in the games industry and interactive media, and we were talking a lot about design process but we were looking at it very broadly as a way of thinking about creating media.

5D has done several events centred around that idea of play as the kind of core creativity and as a liberating way of thinking about the imagination. We are very focused…I mean, I am very interested, just looking at my own children, but there's this moment in play in childhood that is completely liberated. You're taking a stick and a stone and you're imagining it to be whatever you want, a space ship and a…you know, incredibly sophisticated, imaginative play is going on all the time with children. And we lose that ability completely. And we are very interested…what I'm doing at USC in many ways and what 5D is doing is how can we create this sandbox, the kind of conditions of genuinely stimulating kind of play and retrain ourselves to think entirely in the imaginative space, and from that develop a capability for storytelling in a new way.

A lot of that has got to do with, in a way, new toys. We've got some fascinating toys that we've never had in history before, like gesture-based technologies or sculpting digitally or wearing a head-mounted display and living and being entirely inside a virtual world of your own making and getting absorbed by that. So we think that there is a lot of very good and interesting technology-based stimulants that bring us much closer to play.

I'm personally not a technologist at all but I've used technology as a tool to help develop the kind of design of story spaces for a long time, and I've found that the more that technology develops, the closer it resembles the way that we actually think. It's far more intuitive now for me to design in 3-D space than it ever was to design on a drawing board and make plans that are going to evolve into 3-D objects. And that feels to me like there's this opportunity for developing the idea of play as a serious way of working in the imagination space. So I'm totally fascinated by that notion.

Antony Funnell: For a long time of course play was frowned upon, for adults at least, the idea that you gave away childish things, childish ways of behaving. The new technologies that we have, these creative new technologies that we have, as we develop more of them, is that feeding in, in a sense…I mean, in a way they come from play but are they feeding back in then to the rehabilitation of play as an innovative device, do you think?

Alex McDowell: I think so, although I think that the artists have had a free pass as far as play goes. I think that those of us who have been able to be lucky enough to work in the media space or the art space have never been that far away from thumbing their nose at the adult constraints. So we are all pretty childish to begin with. But there's no question that I do see these developments in technology, especially now where we have sort of got beyond the point where you have to know how to code to be able to run a machine, where that sort of idea of user-friendly is becoming…you know, we have the expectation that technology will do what we want it to do without us needing to necessarily be computer scientists.

And in that playful way I'm really enjoying the opportunities that we have right now with some of these tools. And clearly the idea you can picture where any number of the tools that we have now in our hands, what the cell phone is…you know, it's fascinating to me and I love the perversity of the fact that the cell phone, the phone is almost the least useful function of a phone these days. On the whole it's just a toy to open doors into other spaces. And in fact I wish it would stop being a phone completely really.

And so I think that our everyday devices are becoming more and more like liberating tools or toys that we can use, and I think people are getting more and more invested in the idea of where the imagination can take them because they can see how it can actually turn into materiality now. I think that idea that you can 3-D print a gesture that you can make in the air and you can turn it into an object, it's really a mind-twisting paradigm shift.

Adrian Hon: I am Adrian Hon, I am CEO at Six to Start, and also co-creator and lead game designer on Zombies, Run!. One of the things that play allows us to do is to sort of turn structures time into unstructured time. You know, living in London, one of the things that really surprised me when I moved here was how people's time gets booked up weeks, months in advance. So every minute is spent working out where you should be, who you should be talking to. Whereas with play, the best kinds of play are where you lose track of time and you get engrossed in something really fun and really fascinating.

I think one of the most odd things that has happened with smart phones, with tablets, is how this has kind of returned to a lot of adults. I mean, kids have always played, and people who are into games have always played, but people like my mum who plays Angry Birds on her iPad, this is a new thing I think. One of the things that people have always said about the fact that we have our phones next to us 24/7 is it means that we are always on, we are always working, which is certainly true for some people, but I think at the same time if we can inject play experiences into those devices that we have, then we can return a sense of enjoyment and serendipity to things if we design it correctly, and that's partly what we try to do through our games and what other people are trying to do.

Antony Funnell: Has play in the last couple of years changed for adults? Is it now more acceptable for adults to say that they engage in play, that they like to play games?

Adrian Hon: Absolutely, I don't think there's any doubt about that. Gaming has well and truly entered the mainstream, and I think that's simply because we now have these devices on which you can play anything, and people don't seem to be bothered by the fact that they are seen playing silly games like Candy Crush. But I would say that I think that a lot of the games that people are playing are pretty shallow. I'm looking forward to when people move on in terms of exploring more interesting kinds of games.

Antony Funnell: So it would be a mistake to draw necessarily a connection between, say, play and creativity?

Adrian Hon: I think you could draw a very broad line through those two concepts, and certainly there are people who say, well, play is required to be creative, and that's probably true, but I don't think that if you play you automatically become creative. If I spend two hours playing Tetris, that is not being creative, that's just me playing Tetris. And there are certain kinds of games that foster creativity and there are certain kinds of games that are less good at doing that.

Eric Zimmerman: I don't think that games are valuable just because they give us literacy skills or make the world a better place. Games are valuable because play itself is something which is intrinsically valuable for people to do.

Antony Funnell: And that was Professor Eric Zimmerman in New York. And Dmitri Shostakovich, of course. Before them, London-based game designer Adrian Hon from the company Six to Start. And earlier, author Tom Chatfield, and production designer Alex McDowell from the 5D Institute.

Thanks to the production team; Carl Elliott Smith and sound engineer Peter McMurray. Incidentally the music from this program was the Waltz No 2 and variations thereof.

Transcripts of all of our programs are available from the Future Tense website, as is the audio. So if you've missed an episode or want to hear it again, simply search the words 'RN' and 'Future Tense' and you're bound to find us. And remember, if you want to follow us on Twitter, by all means do, our Twitter handle is RNFutureTense, all one word.

I'm Antony Funnell, until next week, cheers and bye for now.

Guests

Tom Chatfield

UK-based author and commentator on digital culture. Author of ‘Fun Inc. Why Games Are The 21st Century’s Most Serious Business.’

Adrian Hon

CEO of Six to Start, author of 'A History of the Future in 100 Objects'.

Alex McDowell

Joint Associate Professor in the Interactive Media, Production, and Media Arts and Practice (iMAP) divisions at the School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California. Creative Director of the World Building Media Lab and the 5D Institute.

Eric Zimmerman

Game designer, entrepreneur, artist, author, and full-time Professor at New York University's Game Centre.